Maggie has had another great year in dance! I love watching her dance and getting her all dressed up! Isn’t she just gorgeous?! I love the recitals. They are 45 minutes long and amazing! Not too long and not too short. I love seeing her shine on stage. We are so proud of you Maggie Leigh!
For David’s birthday this year we had it at the bowling alley. David wanted it there again this year, even though he had it there last year too. He had a great time! I did too. I love going somewhere and not having to do anything for it! The kids did some bowling, we had pizza, did the cake and opened some presents. It was a great time for all!
This year I decided to do a couple of things for the family. One, I decided to do the 12 days of Christmas for David! Everyday he gets a special present from me! I have been planning this for a while and put a lot of time into it and each day I am as excited as he is to have him open it.
The other thing we are doing is the 12 days of Christmas for the kids. Each day they open a present and it is a piece to go with the Nativity scene. We have the kids open a present and then we talk about the piece of the nativity and how they were apart of Jesus’ birthday. I like trying to get the kids attention on Jesus and why we celebrate Christmas. I love how the kids are old enough to have fun with the traditions and be apart of Christmas so much. Maggie and David are always walking around singing a Christmas song! I love it. Parker is always saying “ho,ho, ho!” So Cute.
This year David’s school had Santa come to David’s school and visit the kids before school one day. So I got the kids up and ready and to the school by 8:00 in the morning. It was well worth it. Santa read stories to the kids and then they got to sit on his lap and tell them what they want for Christmas. Parker, Maggie and David all had a great time listening to Santa read to them and seeing him. Parker didn’t sit on Santa’s lap. He didn’t seem interested in him at all after the books were done. Gotta love the Christmas season and all the traditions!
Last weekend I took Maggie to see The Nutcracker. We were both so excited to go to it. It was a local ballet company and was a great price and a great show! Our seats were pretty good. Maggie really enjoyed it. She almost made it the full 2 hours. It was about 10 minutes until it was over that she asked if we could leave yet. Not bad for a four year old! It was a fun girl’s day out and we might make this a yearly thing.
Silhouette Projects
After having my Silhouette for over a month now, I have finally done some projects for myself! I have done a few little things with it (mostly for Young Women) but nothing with vinyl really. So this week I went to work on some decorations for our house! I LOVE it! It’s so much fun to create all these things. I have so many more ideas to do. We will see if I have the time and the money to do them all!
Christmas Decorations
One of my favorite things to do each year is decorating for Christmas. If I had it my way, I would have the decorations up the week of Christmas! David is completely against this though, so I hold off until the day after Thanksgiving,. This year we had to wait until the next Monday, since we were out of town and too exhausted on Saturday. The kids loved helping with the trees. Luckily we have 2 trees. one for the kids downstairs and then one upstairs for me! I still let the kids help with the upstairs tree, but I do some tweaking after they are done. They did a great job with their tree this year. We took them to pick out ornaments as usual too and I always love seeing what they will choose. David chose a dinosaur, Maggie a ballerina pig and Parker a dinosaur as well. Big David picked out a nativity ornament and I picked one to put a picture of us in. Parker was especially excited about his and kept moving it from tree branch to tree branch through out the night and the next day! Such a fun and magical time of year!.
So this year for Thanksgiving we decided to go to my Grandma’s cabin in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. It was a great vacation! Very relaxing. We had no schedule to keep, no chores to keep up with, no phone calls to answer. The best thing was that there was no internet, so David couldn’t do any work there! We got there on Tuesday around 4:00 and were able to get settled in before it got dark. Then Wednesday we just hung out at the cabin and did some last minute shopping to get ready for Thanksgiving dinner the next day. We also went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant that night and it was not bad. I would not choose it over an Arkansan one, but it was way better that Utah’s! Then we did some s’mores that night around a “fire.” Poor David couldn’t get that fire to stay for the life of him. It was just too dry there. But luckily it lasted as long as the kids did, which was about 15-20 minutes and then we were all back inside the nice warm cabin. For Thanksgiving feast we had cheese ball and cream cheese with cranberry for appetizers. Then for lunch we had turkey, rolls, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, jello, and Paula Deen Mac and Cheese! We barely even made a dent in all that food. It was all soooo delicious! For dessert we had Lemon Meringue pie and Apple pie. We were all stuffed that night! Oh the joys of Thanksgiving. This trip was a lot of eating, sleeping and playing games and ping pong. David did bring our xboxes with some kids shows and movies and a few movies and shows for us on them. We would look at the clock thinking it would be like 9:30 at night and it would be 7:00. Time stood still there, but in a good way! On Friday we went into town and walked around and window shopped. Then we went to a malt shop and had some delicious ice cream and malts. We also let the kids play at a playground and walk by the river. It is just so pretty down there. I kept wishing we had our photographer (Marji) there to take pictures for us!
David also made a “tent” for the kids upstairs out of the sheets and ping pong table. They loved it. Biscuit was with us on the trip as well and he was in dog heaven the whole time. He would go out and just be free for a while and then come scratching on the door, when he was ready for a rest. He loved exploring and we were glad we didn’t have any issues with him. We ended up leaving at about 7:30 on Saturday morning. We were all up pretty early that morning due to Biscuit and Parker, so we figured we might as well hit the road. We had such a great time at the cabin and can’t wait to return again sometime.
